Storm Surge Total Water Predictions Using the UFS-Coastal Modeling Framework: A Case Study for Hurricane Florence (2018)

The NOS Storm Surge and the NCAR/ESMF modeling teams in close collaboration with coastal ocean modeling communities are developing the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Coastal Application (UFS-Coastal: https://github.com/oceanmodeling/ufs-coastal/tree/feature/coastal_app). The application offers the coupling infrastructure and the code management infrastructure that allows for a flexible, seamless and easy to follow work-flow coupling of multiple model and data components that link the atmospheric, ocean and terrestrial realms under one common framework. While, UFS-Coastal follows very close the development path of the UFS Weather Model (ufs-weather-model: https://github.com/ufs-community/ufs-weather-model), the application focuses in coastal and regional applications like navigation support, disaster mitigation, water quality and sediment transport and regional forecasting to name a few. To this end, UFS-Coastal contains the ocean modeling components ADCIRC, FVCOM, ROMS , SCHISM and WAVEWATCH III (WW3) and the Parametric Hurricane Modelings System (PaHM) as its atmospheric modeling component.

For the present study, we use UFS-Coastal that utilizes the Community Data Models for Earth Prediction Systems (CDEPS: https://github.com/ESCOMP/CDEPS) as its data component framework and the NUOPC based Community Mediator for Earth Prediction Systems (CMEPS: https://github.com/ESCOMP/CMEPS) as its model coupling framework. In this exercise, the ocean models (ADCIRC, SCHISM and WW3) are forced with atmospheric data via CDEPS while, the ADCIRC and SCHSIM are coupled one-way with WW3 via the CMEPS mediator to generate the surge simulations for Hurricane Florence (2018) on the Eastern Coast of the United States.

The simulation results were compared with observations (NOAA CO-OPS stations) to (a) verify the integrity of the mesh interpolation schemes between the coupled components and (b) validate the model outputs. The simulation results for Hurricane Florence are promising on predicting both the total water levels and the flood inundation under the UFS-Coastal framework. Standard statistical measures were used to validate the performance of the coupled system and to identify spatial and temporal system limitations.